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The following was
prepared by John W. Bakas, Jr.
Riverview
Roots
Riverview,
Florida
BEFORE
the birth of Christ...
BEFORE
the Romans built the Coliseum...
BEFORE
the Egyptians built the Pyramids....
There were
small tribes of Indians living in and around
Riverview and the Lake St. Charles area.
Hillsborough County, Florida
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The Riverview of 10,000 years ago was very much like
the Riverview of today. The neighborhood that we now call home has not
changed its identity, or lost its flavor, in 10,000 years. Ancient
Riverview established its sense of self, its identity, way back in time.
The relationship that the local Indians had to surrounding Indian tribes
in Florida is comparable to the relationship modern Riverview has to its
Big City neighbors. Throughout the millennia Riverview remained as it had
always been, a close, but separate, rural neighbor.
The
Indian story, all 10,000 years of it, is revealed in part by the handful
of artifacts and remains that have been unearthed.
Much of what is known
about the Florida's "modern" Indians has also passed down to us by the Spanish who arrived in the early 1500s, beginning with the voyages of men like
Narvaez, Ponce de Leon, and Hernando de Soto.
The Big Three aborigine Indian groups in Florida
at the time the Spanish arrived were
the Apalachee, the Timucua, and the Calusa.
The fighting Apalachee lived
in the Tallahassee area. It might be that they were upset knowing that the
Florida legislature would soon move into their neighborhood.
Although they never lived there, the Apalachee
Indians, in one of those interesting misunderstandings of geography by the
earliest explorers, also gave their name to that famous mountain range
known as the Appalachian Mountains.
The more
peaceful and largest of all the Indian groups were the Timucua. They
occupied a large area from Ocala to Jacksonville (they must have loved
vacations at Daytona Beach) and even had scattered
groups as far south as Tampa Bay. The Timucua had a more permanent farming-based lifestyle.
Some historians think that the Timucua did not arrive
in Florida by walking in from the north like the other ancient Indians had
done beginning in about 10,000 BC. Instead, the similarities of the
Timucuan language to that of the Indians in the Caribbean islands, cause
some historian to believe that the Timucua arrived by boat from the
south.
The third largest Indian group were the Calusa who lived
around Ft. Myers and who were fierce, brutal people who lived by hunting
and fishing. During his second voyage to southwest Florida in 1521,
Ponce de Leon received a mortal wound from a Calusa arrow to his
thigh.
The number of Indians in Florida when the Spanish
arrived is not known with any precision, but the experts generally say
there were about 300,000 which is the population of the City of
Tampa.
In the early 1500s, when the Spanish came to the West
coast of Florida they encountered Indian cultures that had been in place
for about 500 years, (the Indians had progressed through time
too) the entire Tampa Bay area had fewer concentrations of
Indians than other areas of the state. The Indians around Tampa Bay lived in groups of maybe
less than 50 people each although the larger tribes had more.
By
examination of the mounds created by the Indians either as shell piles
from dinner, burial mounds, temple mounds, or mounds for the
chief's house, modern researchers recreate a picture of the Indians of this area:
"...a thousand years ago, scores of tan,
nearly naked, tattooed bodies scurried about this same neighborhood.
They fished and collected shellfish from the bay, throwing the empty
shells upon a ridge along the shore. They bundled the bones of their
dead in a charnel house [a house where dead bodies were placed], then
buried them in circular mounds with thousands of broken pieces of
pottery. They built palm-roofed homes on the shell mounds for
protection during tidal surges.. [raising the elevation of homes near
the beach was not a common
practice among us newcomers until 460 years after our arrival!]. They
fashioned dugout canoes and collected roots and berries and made tools
from shells. And they built a huge temple mound, sixteen feet high,
for their chief. The temple mound has a ramp that descended to a plaza
where the Indians danced. ... That's our neighborhood in A.D.
1000."
Perry, I. Mac, Indian Mounds You Can Visit, St.
Petersburg, Florida: Great Outdoors Publishing Company, 1993. [At
Riverview Library, the cover of the book has a picture of this written
description.]
In the Tampa Bay area at the
time the Spanish arrived there were four groups of Indians. Starting on the north side of
Tampa Bay, these four Indian tribes lived around the bay, mostly near the water
at the mouth of the rivers.
First, the Tocobaga were the largest tribe and
lived on the north side of the bay near Safety Harbor. You can still
visit one of their mounds at the
Philippie
Park.
Second, the Pohoy are
thought to have lived on the bay east of the Tocobaga and toward the Hillsborough
River.
Third, the Mocoso lived on the east side of the Hillsborough River
and south to the mouth of the Alafia River. The Alafia River,
(pronounced AL-uh-fi, and not AL-uh-FI-uh) gets
its name from an Indian term meaning "River of Fire"
because of the flashes of light that could be seen in the river at
night. Those sparkling streaks were caused by the phosphorus in
the water.
Fourth, the southern group of Indians were
the Uzita
who lived from the Little Manatee River south to Sarasota Bay. De Soto
landed in the territory of the Uzita.
The Story of the Mocoso
and Juan Ortiz
Nearly
a hundred years before the Pocahontas of John Smith fame, a true
Pocahontas story unfolded in the Riverview area. It
involves the Mocoso Indians, one of four groups around the bay, a member
of an expedition to this area before de Soto's, and Hernando de Soto when
he landed in 1539.
In
the Spring of 1539,
Hernando de Soto’s expedition
(Map) encamped at the Little
Manatee River in Uzita territory, the Indians just to the south of the
Mocoso. De Soto sent scouts to
the Alafia area to obtain translators and guides.
The scouting party saw some Mocoso Indians and then chased after and
shot at the Indians in an
attempt to capture them. Suddenly one of the escaping Indians shouted back
in Spanish, “Sirs, for the love of God and of St. Mary, do not kill me;
I am a Christian, like you, and I am a native of Seville, and my name is
Juan Ortiz.”
Ortiz
proceeded to explain that he had been living with the Indians for eleven
years, originally having been captured by the Uzita in 1528 while he was
on a rescue mission to find remnants of the shipwrecked
Narvaez expedition.
In
Uzita custody, Ortiz’s fate was to be burned alive.
An Indian maiden, Ulele (also known as Hirrihigua), begged her
father, the chief, to spare Ortiz’s life.
The chief was moved by his daughter’s plea. Granting her wish, Ortiz was
put
to work guarding a burial house. One
night while on guard duty, Ortiz fell asleep and a wolf carried off
the body of a young child. Infuriated,
the chief ordered another death sentence, but again Ulele intervened, this
time helping Ortiz to escape to the neighboring Mocoso chief who was also the
man Ulele was engaged to marry. The marriage never took place, but Juan Ortiz
survived and continued to live with the Mocoso in the Alafia area until
1539 when Ortiz became de Soto’s translator.
The Mocoso chief had promised Juan Ortiz that if the whites ever
returned, Juan could return to the Spanish.
The Mocoso chief=s
words were preserved in the original records of de Soto=s
expedition:
AI
appear before your Lordship (de Soto) with as much confidence of
receiving favor as if, in fact, this my Agood
will@
were manifest to you be deeds C
not for the small service which I did you of the Christian (Juan
Ortiz) whom I hold in my possession, by giving him his liberty freely,
for I was obligated to do that in order to keep my honor and what I
had promised him....@
Interestingly,
the Mocoso were the only group of Indians not mistreated by Hernando de
Soto when he came in 1539 and the only tribe that welcomed the Spanish
with hospitality.
It also quite probable that Juan Ortiz was the first permanent European
resident in the continental United States of whom there is any written
record.
Residents in the former Mocoso territory should honor the memory of
Riverview’s first European resident, Juan Ortiz, the real Pocahontas
who lived by the Alafia River
— the River
of Fire,
and the noble Mocoso chief.
Ships brought the Europeans to Tampa
Bay
and ships took the last Indians away
The last record of any of the aborigine Indians
in the Tampa bay area comes from records of the Cuban oyster fishermen who built a shell fishery near the Hyatt Regency on S.R. 60 in
1710. These Cuban fishermen, who were the descendants of the sometimes
cruel Spanish explorers who had first come here 200 years
earlier, lived in a small village near Rocky Point (SR 60, by
Tampa International Airport) during the cooler months and harvested the
oysters.
The notion that the Cubans arrived in Tampa in 1886 to begin
making cigars is a myth. Both Cubans and cigar making were here long
before Ybor City or the Seminoles (Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama)
who came to live in this area in the early 1800s). We
might say that the Spanish have been here since the early
1500s.
The shell-fishing Cubans of 1710 lived and fished in
Tampa Bay and their oyster shells were tossed out Indian-style along the
shoreline of the upper Tampa Bay.
These Cubans also employed the small number of
Tocobagas who were the remaining members of the Indian groups living in
the Tampa Bay area. The Cubans now worked side-by-side with Indians,
ate the same food, and may have even helped place the final
shells on the Indian shell mounds in the area --- a fitting
irony and last direct link to this area's 10,000-year old Indian
way of life.
For over 50 years, from
1710 until 1763, (just 13 years before those fierce 13 far-off English colonies
revolted from their chief) the Cubans continued to return each year in
peace to the
home of the Tocobagas.
But in 1763, the
dreaded English acquired what is now Florida
from Spain. In another one of the twists of history, the Cubans and the Tocobagas left the area
together and moved to
the Caribbean Islands. The thought of English control caused the remaining
Indians and Cubans in Tampa Bay to flee.
For the Cubans leaving the area in 1763, it would not
be a final goodbye. They would soon return as part of the
Second
Spanish Period in Florida. But as the last few Tocobagas sailed
out of the
same bay that had drawn in Narvaez and Hernando de Soto 230 years earlier,
we might watch as these Indians turned for a look at a land
now totally abandoned and virtually depopulated, a land
that had always been the home of the Indian, not the Spanish or the English.
As the Tocobagas passed by the Alafia River, the
Indians whose life had been determined by the sea and sky for 10,000
years, quietly let themselves be taken away by the wind and the tide.
[Prepared by John Bakas, Revised July 25, 2004]
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